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Saturday, November 18, 2006

Will HD Photo replace JPG?

I have dozens of DVDs containing over 10 years of my digital photos stored for safe keeping. I’ve often wondered if years from now my grandchildren will actually have the tools to read these DVDs and view the JPG file format

JPG is short for JPEG or Joint Photographic Experts Group, a standardization committee which defined the file format. This format has become the De facto standard for digital image files. Over the years a number of other formats have tried to replace JPG including PNG and a new format from JPEG called JPEG2000. Luckily for my grandchildren, the standard JPG format has survived all the attacks.

Always wanting to be king of the hill, Microsoft is promoting its own image format now call “HD Photo”. Changing the name to Hi Def Photo was obviously a marketing decision but not a bad one. According to Microsoft…

“HD Photo delivers a lightweight, high performance algorithm with a small memory footprint that enables practical, in-device encoding and decoding. It delivers compression quality comparable with JPEG-2000 and more than twice the quality of JPEG.

HD Photo is the new name for Windows Media Photo. Both names refer to the exact same file format. The Windows Media Photo name is still used to describe the implementation of HD Photo in Microsoft Windows products.”Click here for more.

Naturally, HD Photo support is available for Windows XP, Server 2003 and will be native to Windows Vista. Microsoft has done an amazing job at making their WMV (Windows Media Video) format compete with other a popular video formats. Most video editors had no choice but to support it. I suspect the same will be true with .WDP or the new preferred .HDP extension.

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